Jay Coburn

So why not enemy number one of several countries and the Catholic Church?

If Dig of All Planets and other hip hop artists put saxophone to hip hop, artists like James Brown brought it into mainstream pop music.

The 80s were really peak saxophone.

The sax became so pervasive that it kind of jumped the shark into cheesiness.

Think Careless Whisper.

In the end, the scorching sax solo faded out of fashion, and the saxophone was so ubiquitous that it became kind of just another instrument.

One you might pick up in music class at school, or a bit of extra flavor added to the standard modern rock or pop lineup.

Guitar, drums, bass, keys, and oh, why not a sax?

Still, I'd argue that this image of the saxophone is incomplete.

It doesn't do justice to the versatile, flexible instrument that Adolph Sax put into the world.

The saxophone's brilliance has always been in its versatility.

When Adolph Sax invented the saxophone, he designed it to be a marriage of loud and soft, bold and smooth.

The saxophone is loud enough to hold its own on any stage, but it's also soft and nuanced enough to rise and fall like the human voice.

The sound, on a fundamental level, might be made by air vibrating inside a mathematically appropriate metal tube.

But how it makes you feel, that's all about the human who's blowing on that reed, pressing those keys, and feeling the sax appeal.

I absolutely do.

So we mentioned the saxophone craze, and I promised you I'd play you some recordings of the kind of weird and wonderful instruments that Paul Cohen has in his sax museum.

Totally.

So the museum is in Englewood, New Jersey, so pretty easy to get to from New York.

It's basically just the lower half of his house.